A Revolution in R&D

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the risks involved, momentous investment decisions
will need to be made, and at the very highest levels
of the organization. And R&D executives will face a
daunting new set of management responsibilities
and challenges. These include:
• Selecting an appropriate research focus—no
longer just the therapeutic area or disease state of
interest, but also such dimensions as target class
and treatment modality
• Choosing which technologies to implement and
when and how to implement them—in-house, or
through partnering or licensing
• Rebalancing the value chain—partly by reallocating
resources but mainly by redesigning processes
and more actively planning and managing capacity
• Establishing a unified informatics infrastructure—including
a centralized knowledge management
system
• Establishing the new organization—creating new
interfaces within the R&D department, between
departments, and even between corporations
• Revising decision-making procedures—fully
exploiting the latest data in order to select the
most promising targets and compounds to move
through the pipeline and to optimize their relative
resourcing
• Reinforcing these various reforms by engaging
the emotional and behavioral issues as keenly as
the operational ones
All things considered, companies cannot stand
aside. Certainly there are risks in signing up for the
revolution, but there is also a great risk in ignoring
it—the risk of becoming uncompetitive. The revolution
is real, and will leave no one untouched.